Jenny Filter loves her flip-flops. You can tell. There she is, biking past you, in her flip-flops. There she is, biking up the Grand Mesa.

This isn’t Filter’s first Ride the Rockies, and even when it was, she was there, in her flip-flops. Filter’s bicycled the past 11 Ride The Rockies, yes, in her flip-flops. A friend convinced her to ride it in 2005, and she did, on her 12-year-old mountain bike.

In her flip-flops.

The 2005 Ride The Rockies took riders on the same first two days as the 2015 Ride The Rockies.

“I wore flip-flops, I didn’t know how to bike, I didn’t know what I was doing,” Filter said.

By the time she got to the third aid station on the 2005 ride up the Grand Mesa, she thought she was halfway up the climb. There was still almost 5,000 feet to go.

“It was awful,” she said. “It was brutally hot.”

If you don’t know Grand Mesa, it was the central attraction of day two of Ride The Rockies, a 500 square mile mesa and mountain with more than 300 lakes placed across the top. The climb up and down was the highlight of day two.

This was the first truly difficult day. Day 2 of the 2015 Ride The Rockies took riders up more than 7,600 feet in elevation gain — the vertical equivalent of bicycling up the side of Oregon’s Mt. Hood.

Filter’s current flip-flops are on their eighth Ride The Rockies. They are also one of her 10-20 pairs of flip-flops Filter, who’s a dentist in Salida, owns. “If there’s not snow on the ground I’m in flip-flops.”

Filter’s never tried shoes, “I don’t want to be strapped in,” she said.

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